I gave this one s C because while the production values are still very low (very sparse sets, almost deserted station, etc.), the cast was better, the story was better and the Starfury stuff was very good. The CGI of NYC destruction was disappointing because in the process of the destruction, it seemed that not much was really being destroyed. Didn't seem like the beams were really doing much except creating a heat/wind for Sheridan to react against. The NYC pre-destruction scenes were great, as was the clip of the future Earth-Centauri battle, all of which were over much too quickly.

Not a bad effort, but the budget was obviously threadbare.

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Mac Breck (KoshN)
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"Crusade" (1999) - "War Zone"
Max Eilerson: "The story of my life. I finally find a city like this, intact, deserted for ten thousand years. Probably contains hundreds of patents that I could exploit and I'm going to die. I can appreciate dramatic irony as much as the next person, but this is pushing it a bit."

Just got these two eps, and watched them. While the first one was meh, this one I really liked.

Although I never got Sheridan's animosity for reporters (Clark-era ISN aside, which was completely understandable)--a functioning and informative press is important in a free society, and she was asking pretty harmless questions anyway--I found his somewhat sardonic treatment of the reporter who'd never experienced the effects of quantum-space travel amusing ("was that a new dress?").

And of course the dilemma posed by Galen over what to do with this Prince Vintari (the old "if you could go back in time to kill the boy Adolf Schicklgruber before he became Hitler, would you do it" question--only without the complications of a disrupted timeline, since it's not the past being changed)--the answer he came up with shows what a great and big-hearted man he was.

I don't remember any other mention of this Vintari though, in the Centauri Trilogy or elsewhere (if he was in the Trilogy, I don't remember him)--certainly no mention of him in the Sheridan household with David, although he may not have been there that long. Of course, that would have spoiled this episode since the Trilogy came out first (I think), so probably for the best anyway. A book about his stay there and what he learns (and what Sheridan and Delenn might have learned from him) would be interesting--along with seeing if he reconciles with Emperor Vir Cotto, the man who killed his father Cartagia (and likely saved his life in the process, from the imminent Vorlon attack*). Indeed I've often wondered what the reign of the enlightened Vir would have been like.... Remember Londo's tongue-in-cheek line in "Objects at Rest" that "after I'm gone, the Centaurum will probably find a way to do away with the position of Emperor"? I actually thought that that might be a reform that Vir makes--guiding his people toward something more democratic, or at least not so autocratic (which would have by that time proved conclusively dangerous to the Centauri people, as witness where the last three had led them--with or without keepers). Maybe not (or maybe he tries and gets thwarted, by either Vintari in the "old" timeline or someone else in the "new")....

I gave the episode an A because it was a good character piece for Sheridan, it had Galen in it (who's a favorite character of mine), and had that cool view of New York in the late 2200s. And Vintari, just introduced in the B5 universe, was an intriguing character to speculate about.

*We find Cartagia had a son, something I'd never have guessed--because it makes his indifference to the destruction of his world even more strange.

And of course the dilemma posed by Galen over what to do with this Prince Vintari (the old "if you could go back in time to kill the boy Adolf Schicklgruber before he became Hitler, would you do it" question--only without the complications of a disrupted timeline, since it's not the past being changed)--the answer he came up with shows what a great and big-hearted man he was.

.

If time travel were possible, I am not sure it be necessary to kill Hitler. The thing to do would be persuade that art school that rejected him to accept him as a student. While Hitler had had problems before this - a bad relationship with his dictatorial father which probably amounted to being abusive, and an over-protective mother, it was after that he was rejected from art school that Hitler began to go strange.

It is interesting to consider a world where Hitler went to art school, and perhaps go on scrape a living from art - he wasn' that great I understand. Or maybe he would have died in WWI. Now - that would have been the ideal time to kill him if a time traveller wanted to do it. Make it look like he died in battle. Just another dead soldier.